The 24-year-old multimillionaire can see where I'm coming from. "Yes, I can appreciate that, given the downturn in the sector as a whole," he replies, unruffled.

Downturn is the polite word for it. In the six-monthly Audit Bureau of Circulations figures for the second half of 2009, the star performer was BBC Focus, with a 2% year-on-year rise. Esquire and GQ were down on the year, while even the mighty Men's Health, the top paid-for men's title with sales of 250,000 and 16 consecutive year-on-year increases, could only muster an infinitesimal rise. There was not much good news, although Esquire and Stuff put on sales in the second half of last year. So did Front, which didn't report a yearly figure, but experienced a circulation rise of 10.4% in the second half to 41,946, making it the second smallest paid-for men's magazine.

Multiple owners

But McVey, who grew up in east London and made his first million aged 15 importing scooters from America, funded by "borrowing" his dad's credit card details, is immensely proud of his magazine, which he purchased for £87,500 with his business partner Francis Ridley, the managing director of the talent agency Money. When their company Kane bought the title from Flip Media, the magazine's fourth owner since its 1998 launch, Front had just made a net loss of more than £155,000.

McVey is utterly serious in his quest to grow the magazine. "This is not a pet project for me, I'm taking this very seriously. I'm not doing this as a way to meet young women. If we can prove success with Front there will be more titles."

He says the magazine's audience is unique. "Front is talking to 16 to 24-year-olds. Recent data shows us that 70% of Front readers do not read any other magazine. If you go to Brighton, Bournemouth or Hull on a weekend, people are listening to bands we have written about, wearing clothes we have written about and talking about the girls we have shot. You just know that's a demographic that has been abandoned. Advertisers hate students because they don't think they have any cash."

Rob Lynam, the head of press trading at the media buying and planning agency Mediaedge:cia, says that while Front's circulation is a problem, a bigger difficulty is the sector's slide into irrelevance. "The lads' mag sector is suffering a long slow death and I don't know what any publisher can do to stop it. Culturally it's not that interesting, it's not as if any of these titles are doing anything that hasn't been done before that captures young men's imaginations."

When Front launched in 1998, with a pair of men's 3D specs as a cover mount to accompany its "3D babefest poster", Sainsbury's and Asda were shocked and returned 24,000 copies, but the 400,000 print run apparently sold out.

That year, FHM, the leading men's magazine for more than a decade, sold 775,000 copies. But the market became saturated and as circulations started to fall, publishers crammed their mags with more and more girls, descending into soft porn. "Not a great long term strategy," Lynam concludes.

In the 90's lads' magazines seemed to matter, now they don't. When Maxim, the brand that its publisher Felix Dennis said earned him $3bn worldwide, closed its UK edition last April, Fleet Street barely reported it. Bauer's upmarket Arena had shut a month earlier, after 22 years.

With the closure of those titles, competitors could have expected some gains, but it didn't happen. While its annual figure was down, Esquire managed a 12.2% rise in the second half to 59,160, but immediately the competing upmarket men's mag GQ cried foul. Jamie Bill, GQ's publishing director, emailed his troops to congratulate them on its supposedly "brilliant" monthly sale of 120,057 (down 7.7% on the year). "PS, Esquire will be boasting of a large increase (still nearly three times fewer copies than us!) – you shouldn't believe it as over 50% of their January newsstand was sold in discount packs with incongruous titles like She and over 25% of the total were discount copies."

Beyond this squabble, the fragility in the men's market is shown by the fact that each month Men's Health, T3, Esquire, GQ and Wired give awayabout 10,000 free copies each in monitored free distribution, while FHM gives away 20,000. The practice, defended as sampling, contrasts with the approach of newspapers, which have abandoned such freebies over the past year. Front offered no freebies, and at the newsstand it sold more full-price copies than Esquire, T3, Bizarre and Wired.

Because it has virtually no subscriptions and sells at full price, it offers a better retail sales value (a measure of a magazine's value to retailers) than other titles, despite its smaller circulation. McVey says: "I can assure you we will be making a profit in our first year. My big challenge with Front is educating the market as to its value."

He studiously avoids mentioning the weekly lads' mags, Zoo and Nuts – considered to be his direct rivals because of their younger demographic – until near the end of the interview, when he says their portrayal of women is "very distasteful. The girls in Front are very cool and edgy. They are not looking to date a footballer, they are into tattoos and indie music."

Lynam thinks Front is not troubling its rivals and will need to get its circulation up to 100,000 before it does so. McVey counters: "It's my demographic, it's my audience. I'm not only in the business, I'm the consumer as well. It allows me to connect with 45,000 other people a month."

One form of competition the lads' mags did not contend with during their 90s heyday was the free weekly magazines. The momentum seems to be with Shortlist (distribution 513,148), and Sport (distribution 306,435), which offer advertisers an attractive combination of a larger audience than all other titles and four issues a month.

Front won't go free, McVey declares. A sign of confidence is the recent 20p cover price rise to £3.80. "We have really dedicated readers. If they don't have £3.80 they will save up. If you go free you lose that dedication."